It's About Time.

As business owners, it's important we stay organized and utilize tools that can save us time, money, or generally simplify our lives. I would wager to guess many of us are guilty of spending significant amounts of time on critical yet mundane tasks. There are solutions available, you just need to sometimes dig a bit for them. I always have my shovel with me - and I'm putting together a series of posts highlighting some of the ones I think are valuable. This is the first in that series.

Stay SynchedI work primarily from a laptop that I drag around with me, but I also have a desktop in my office as well as my home. I hated carrying around a USB drive with all my important files on it - I would misplace it, it would get corrupted, or I'd simply forget to save something to it. A while back I stumbled across Dropbox. It's basically an online repository for files that you can access anywhere. It's not the only service of its kind, but in my opinion it's one of the best.

Once you sign up for an account, you get a certain amount of space for free. Referring the service to friends can easily gain you a few extra gigabytes. What's cool about the service is how it seamlessly ties into Windows or OSx. It creates a folder, called Dropbox, and anything saved into it immediately and automatically gets synched with any other computers you have the software installed. You can also access the files through the Dropbox website, or any smartphone with the Dropbox app installed.

Wait, Back Up a Second.Backing up data is a pain. No one likes to think about their hard drive crashing, yet at the same time few of us take the time to move important data to archive media. Those of us that do likely keep the stacks of DVDs or tapes or [gasp] floppy disks right in our offices. It's fine if your hard drive crashes, but what if there's a flood, or a fire? Backups should be kept off-site, no exceptions. The problem with that is, of course, quickly accessing them.

There are many reasonably priced applications that will manage your backups. For example, there's Carbonite, or Mozy (which I have used for years). Your data is stored (securely encrypted) on their servers, and like Dropbox it's accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. You need to install a small program that will copy the files from locations you designate to be backed up. Depending on the amount of data you have, the first run may take a while - days, if not weeks. After that, it runs nightly and only sends what's new or what's been changed. It all runs in the background, and after a while you won't even notice it's there. Until, that is, your PC crashes at 2am and you need an important file to meet an even more important deadline.

So no more burning backup DVDs, and no more managing USB drives or emailing files to yourself to stay synched. It's really all about saving time - more time to put into our businesses or spend with our families. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, which I'll mention in future posts. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, let's hear them in the comments!